On Morris Island, South Carolina, Confederate defenders of Fort Wagner beat back a second heavy attack

07/18/1863

Union forces initiated an artillery and naval gunfire barrage at mid-morning on the Confederate fortifications on Morris Island, protecting Charleston Harbor. Ten hours later, at dusk, two full brigades, the 54th Massacusetts in the lead, made a ground assualt. In heavy fighting that cost the lives of hundreds of Union officers and men and decimated the African-American 54th, the attack was repulsed. Federal forces settled afterwards into a a siege but Fort Wagner remained in Confederate hands until September 1863. (By John Osborne)

Source Citation:

Russell Duncan, Where Death and Glory Meet: Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the Fifty-Fourth Massacusetts Infantry (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 112-116.